I didn’t realize that it’s been a month since I got back from Lalandia (it feels like it was yesterday), and I still have something to finish blogging about. Shame on me!

My evening at the Lalandia Waterpark is probably one the most exciting time I had in Denmark. The Waterpark adventures started right after the Gala Dinner. It was a pleasure after dinner to dive into a hot tub and sip cold cocktails. Not only was it it a pleasure for our bodies but for our minds as well. In the photo below, you can see us discussing Tapio Lahdenmäki’s presentation on indexing.

If Jonathan Lewis and Cary Milsap are impressed with Tapio’s work — you can be sure it’s worthwhile to read (twice) his book, take his masterclass, or attend one of his presentations.

There was an abundance of light drinks. I have to say “light” as that beer (it was Tuborg, right?) only made me feel full and had me running to the men’s room every 30 minutes. On the other hand, low alcohol content was actually a very good idea. But even with that, I recall trying to run down the waterslide on my feet, and based on the state of my elbow the next morning, I’d say that wasn’t a very good idea. By the way, despite the abundance of drinks, some of us managed to get away with just Coke:

I was hardly able to recognize that face on the photo but this is an example of what can happen if you stick to Coke in Lalandia Waterpark!

(I should mention that traditionally, the Waterpark adventures ended up in the hospital for some. This year was unusual because everyone safely made it to the Party House shortly after 1am. But I digress.)

I expected the Waterpark to turn into a massive booze-up, but I was wrong! It’s true that by the end of it, some of us were not able to leave the place without help of our peers, but the party house was a very desirable destination, so even the “helpless” managed to get there and have a “very powerful nap” on the very comfortable sofa. Sorry, I digress again.

During the evening, I had the pleasure of discussing a few recently-published books, my experiences presenting at different conferences, and the differences between audiences depending on geographical location. Amongst other database topics that evening there was a very interesting discussion about current instrumentation efforts of non-Oracle databases. It is interesting that some of proponents of SQL Server and MySQL instrumentation are going down the path that Oracle had already trod, and making the same mistakes in trying to come up with abundance of ratios and other “secondary” statistics, instead of the single absolutely true measure. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t you?

Right before I left for Europe I bought a new camera — an Olympus 720 SW. It makes average quality pictures, but it can go 10 metres underwater, be frozen or boiled (well, almost) and still work. I wanted to stress test this; here are the results:

You probably won’t recognize the crazy guy on the photo — good thing too.

For quite some time we were going back and forth between waterslide and hot tub, sipping cold beer and chatting about databases, and not about drink, women, fishing, sauna, and other “boring” topics:

We had planned to organize a super mass-transit system taking all OCPs, OCMs, ACEs and Oakies down the water hose in few seconds. However, it seems that Lalandia’s personnel remember last years’ adventures ending up in the hospital, so they foiled our plan — which was probably for good. Nevertheless, the most foolhardy of us tried to set new speed record, such as Anjo:

Graham:

and… oh.. can’t make out the face on this photo:

The life of a photo-journalist is not easy, as they must put themselves in very unusual places to get a good shot… sometimes risking their lives. That evening was no exception, and Mogens managed to get into one of the best shots of the evening:

To summarize, our Lalandia Waterpark outing was an absolute success. I had a very good time and learned a lot as well. The tickets that we had were valid next day as well, but I couldn’t use that to my advantage as I had to take some rest and leave half-way through the night.

That’s it for today, folks. I should still have an interesting post about our Sauna experience there, so stay tuned. I just hope it won’t be a month later.

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